This morning I received a nice e-mail from my website host regarding my transfer limit. It seems that PI has used 85% of the available limit for this month. Did I want to buy more?

WHAT!

After a brief (very brief) moment of pride, I realized that this in no way could be attributed to the popularity of this site. I mean… let’s get real, folks. The other two sites I own, both of which have similar traffic, use a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth.

The difference between PI and the other two sites? A glance at the traffic logs revealed that the number of bandwidth-sucking hits received from spam bots has risen exponentially since this site first came up. Its been ages since there were any spam bots that have managed to write comment or trackback spam, but that hasn’t stopped them from stealing my transfer allocation and leaving me holding the bill. I’ve put in a few new features that will hopefully stop them in their tracks.

My host (Successful Hosting) is in the process of “migrating all accounts to our new, better systems and servers” and thus will not allow me to upgrade or buy more bandwidth at this time. The new accounts come with “one free dedicated IP address.” They don’t have any free right now, but the nice service tech would be happy to move me over right now to a shared account and give me a month free hosting. When I explained that no move would happen until a dedicated IP address was available and asked what I was supposed to do until then,the nice tech was kind enough to double my transfer allocation for free, at least for now.

Having been through the “new, better servers, and don’t worry about sharing your IP address temporarily” bit with a different host, I am now in the market for a “new and better” host for my sites. Suggestions are welcome!

Remarks:

Depends on how much bandwidth you are using. For my blog, I use livingdot.com and have been very happy with them. Comes with a dedicated IP, a great control panel, and great support. I pay $9.95 a month. I also have an account with dreamhost.com. I pay $9.95 a month there as well an get 2.4GB of storage and 120GB of bandwidth. That is a shared IP account though (I use it for hosting my video and large files mostly). Good luck!

Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.